You should give up talking about this here Ambivalent Duck. The more doctrinaire these guys become the more sure you can be they have an ulterior motive. They live in a world where Conspiracy cards make perfect sense on the first glance and Contract from Below is too horribly complicated for anyone to ever understand.

Yeah, classifying hybrids as mono-colored creatures is just an excuse to run more multi-colored creatures heh

This line of thinking has never made a bit of sense. The argument (and I use the term loosely) appears to be that if you count Cackler as a gold card you can "cheat" on gold cards since it really isn't gold. First, this is an admission that Cackler isn't a gold card. Second, if you want to play less gold cards in your Cube you can simply..I dunno..play less gold cards in your Cube. Which has nothing to do with Rakdos Cackler or hybrid cards in most cases (obviously things like Boros Reckoner or Boggart Ram-Gang push the envelope)

Using hybrid mana as a strange technicality to claim/pretend that you have more gold cards in your Cube has absolutely nothing to do with Cube design whatsoever. If anything, it creates the opposite problem where you decree a quota of gold cards but some of the color pairs have hybrids in those slots and some don't. Which produces a higher density of true gold cards in the color pairs which don't.

The only explanation I've ever been able to muster is that Cube taxonomy has turned into a fetish.

They both drew about the same amount of cards per game on average. The Scrivener either drew none or drew a bunch, but not a whole lot in between. Whereas I was usually able to get a card out of Pain Seer almost every game. The ceiling was lower on the Seer, but the average performance was better. And the second point of toughness was relevant, even though the average amount of life lost per card was slightly higher. So both cards are really similar, except instead of the card draw per game being 0, 0, 0, 4 it was 1, 1, 1, 1.

My apologies. Is that your alter ego or are there actually two of you advancing your garbage?

Is that why you asked why I didn't reference the Sedition Act when I did? Cuz that kind of sounds like someone who didn't look up the actual case.

You only referenced it by its formal name because you were clearly unaware that the case you were talking about WAS the Sedition Act. Which you then somehow tried to claim ended up defending socialists (???) I suppose the Reichstag Decree was friendly to socialists too, on the grounds that surely at least one person must have dissented to it.

You don't understand why I object to someone who can't be bothered or is too much of a klutz to get the facts straight playing the expert? Or is it just a coincidence that every point you got wrong was entirely self-serving?

Perhaps there is more to understanding a subject than spending five seconds on Google? And your readers are left to suppose that your opinions on anything else (say, communism or history or society) are grounded in much deeper thought and research? You already dispensed with that theory (you claim you slogged through -- another of your synonyms for "perused on the toilet" I'm sure -- Marx's Capital at university)

Not to mention you're doing the exact same thing. It's not as though you knew about Abrams v. United States prior to this debate either.

It IS as though I knew it prior to this exchange. Pretty much everybody but you knew about it.

I posted the link so that people could see for themselves where you tried (and, sadly, failed) to crib your information. Since that is beyond obvious I can only assume you are being disingenuous in an attempted cya. I hope you're not as clumsy at covering for yourself as you are at getting stuff right in first place, although I guess a lifetime of playing the expert has given you plenty of practice being caught with your pants down.

So clearly it is possible for someone to go off on the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" without recognizing that it is employed to defend the rights of people like himself.

The entire history of anti-communism in American disagrees with any whacko notion that "the market of ideas" somehow incorporates protection for socialists. For starters, you could look at the Sedition Act itself (which has reasserted itself rather dramatically of late). Communists and socialists have been (and are) openly persecuted and targeted in the United States any and every time they have ever had a presence in the country. I don't know how oblivious one would have to be to deny that. I would rather not find out but I have a feeling I'm going to.

You have it entirely backwards. You are so sure that all readers are completely ideologically indoctrinated into your philistine belief system that you think throwing around wild claims in colorful language (oceans of blood, mountains of corpses) somehow overwrites the well documented and indisputable genocides of the last century -- by the murderous, barbaric capitalist class.

Functioning as a mouthpiece for the most vile and reprehensible propaganda does not constitute "raising actual questions about my position". Tu quoque my ass. Yours is more the "tu madre" style of debate.

On EDIT: are you seriously throwing in with High Roller on the point of cribbing from Wikipedia? You realize that what he tried to do (ineptly with quite a bit of haughtiness thrown in) constitutes EXTREME intellectual dishonesty, no? Since you are so concerned with points of order regarding argumentation. Honestly, you guys are borderline solipsists. You think you can throw any old crap out there and it will simply be accepted without scrutiny.

. Your response to every question concerning your position has been silence (a silence I find particularly salient when it comes to the matter of the oceans of blood and mountains of corpses that accrue to the practice of the ideology you're defending)

You have it entirely backwards. You are so sure that all readers are completely ideologically indoctrinated into your philistine belief system that you think throwing around wild claims in colorful language (oceans of blood, mountains of corpses) somehow overwrites the well documented and indisputable genocides of the last century -- by the murderous, barbaric capitalist class.

It seems that you would like me to defend the lies you attribute to be my position and hope that I thereby adopt them as my own. I note that you provide not a shred of evidence regarding your "oceans of blood" nor do your try to fashion a comparison to the prevailing capitalist system.

Or are you pretending to not be aware that capitalists were behind the Holocaust and the concurrent holocaust in India that seems to have been orchestrated merely on the whim of the butcher Churchill? These killing sprees being only a fraction of those immolated in two conjoined world wars with a worldwide Depression sandwiched in between? Do you really think everyone else is an ignorant, credulous Americana like yourself?

Wow, I've talked to raving loon College Republicans who were less unhinged than you two. Not everyday you meet two shrill anti-communist pygmy intellectuals of this magnitude. At any rate, I have neither the time or the patience to be drawn further into your pissant BS. Sound your state department ideology (almost verbatim no less) to the rafters.

I will close with a curious historical note:

What, that you made a snide remark about the person who coined the phrase "marketplace of ideas," without having the historical knowledge to know that John Stuart Mill was was a utilitarian, an advocate for the rights of the individual, a supporter of worker cooperatives, and at times a defender of socialist policies, or that the Supreme Court Justice who was famous for bringing this phrase into the US political dialogue did so during a case in which he was defending a person who was protesting against the US from providing military assistance against the Bolsheviks?

Sadly, no, I don't find that strange at all. The demonstration of a complete lack of historical knowledge in your arguments has proven itself to be well within the parameters of what is normal.

If I may offer a suggestion, learning everything you know about a subject from wikipedia during the middle of a discussion is a bad idea. I tried to let you off the hook gently.

1. the odds of anyone knowing off the top of their head the entire notable history of the phrase "marketplace of ideas" is vanishing and zero in your case

2. You didn't even bother to read the article since your claims are explicitly refuted in the article especially since the article addresses the concept and not the phrase.

JS Mill coined the phrase you say?

The marketplace of ideas metaphor was first developed by John Stuart Mill in his book, On Liberty in 1859 (although he never uses the term "marketplace").

Oops..swing and a miss

Oh,it was Oliver Wendell Holmes then

The first reference to the "free trade in ideas" within "the competition of the market" appears in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s dissent in Abrams v. United States.

Huh, 0 for 2..

If you had continued reading..er, skimming, uh..cherry picking you could have also invoked Milton and Jefferson.

At issue was never the origination of the idea (and even JS is a bit late in the game to claim that) but rather the appearance of the phrase as it is bandied about by philistines like yourself in casual conversation. You honestly think whenever some modern sh!t-for-brains throws out the term that he is harking back to Holmes and the irony of dissenting against THE SEDITION ACT? (yeah, you clicked one wiki link too few on that one, old buddy)

Again, before you try to squirm out of this do be sure and tell us how you knew off the top of your head that it was Holmes dissent in Abrams while failing to note that this was the well known Sedition Act.

Second, and how's this for irony, in terms of US politics, the phrase "marketplace of ideas" is famously linked to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case of Abrams v. United States, in which Holmes defends the free speech rights of the defendants who were protesting United States involvement against the Bolsheviks.

Strange, don't you think? Only a few years ago the modern US liberal would have made quite a production distancing himself from Mill. Today, the repugnant resemblance is too uncanny for anyone to deny. The truth is that the liberals have always professed such profoundly right wing ideas but they are taken as such articles of faith and commonplaces that it scarely necessary to repeat them. To them it is not even a question: of course human ingenuity and knowledge are subject to the same fetters as all other sphere's of human life. Of course it has always been so. Those are bedrock statements of liberalism.